By Philip Newman
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced the arrests, which they said were made Tuesday after a 14-month investigation dubbed “House of Cards” into an identity theft ring operating in Queens.
The alleged boss of the ring is based in Flushing, the DA said.
“Many of the defendants are acused of going on nationwide shopping sprees, buying tens of thousands of dollars worth of high end electronics, handbags, jewelry and other expensive merchandise with forged credit cards,” Brown told a news conference Thurday at Police headquarters in lower Manhattan.
The stolen merchandise was then sold on an Internet Web site operated by the theft ring, prosecutors said.
“What was particularly disturbing is the fact that in a number of cases, the defendants are charged with using bogus documents to buy airline tickets, then using those documents as identification to board commercial airliners.” Brown said, suggesting they gained the same access as terrorists.
Brown said that even after those arrested go through the legal system, “their victims are still faced with the difficult task of having to repair their credit ratings and financial reputations. In some cases that process can take years.”
Kelly said “this industrious New York-based ring utilized internatonal and domestic resources to orchestrate their crimes from the Pacific Northwest to the southestern U.S. but then NYPD Organized theft and identity theft Task force worked harder.”
The police commissioner said the NYPD had what he called a committed team of investigators and foreign language translators “who tirelessly pursued the suspects to stop their widespread use of innocent people's good credit.”
The indictment charges that Kwok Chow, 36, also known as Tony, of 132-45 41st Ave. in Flushing, was boss of the ring and as such got lists of credit card account numbers and blank credit cards from suppliers who obtained the information from an unknown person in China.
Police displayed piles of the fake credit cards, driver's licenses and hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly in $100 bills along with vast amounts of electronics equipment and machines used to manufacture fake credit cards.
